Hold Congress Accountable

About FreedomConnector

Find activists, groups, and events right in your own neighborhood. Join FreedomConnector to get involved and learn more about key issues threatening our economic freedom. Whether you’re looking for like-minded people, trying to boost your existing group’s impact, or simply trying to stay up on current events, FreedomConnector is the place to start. See what’s happening in your state today!

Search FreedomWorks

Resources

Blog

Another ObamaCare Victim: Young, Healthy, and Priced Out of Her Health Care Plan

In his effort to try to convince Americans that the Affordable Care Act was going to be affordable, and that benevolent big government cared, President Obama exclaimed, "If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan. Period."

We are not even two weeks into the implementation of the state exchanges, which are part of the president's signature health care law, but even long before now millions of Americans began finding out that they cannot in fact keep their health care plans.

Today, I was contacted by another victim of ObamaCare. Her email to me simply stated "I do not get to keep my plan." She enclosed a copy of the letter she received from her insurance company, BlueCross BlueShield, explaining that her plan was no longer going to be available since it was not in compliance with the ACA.

The letter goes on to state that though her out of pocket costs will go down, her monthly premiums will increase. She shopped online through their website, and the statement in the letter about costs was only half true. Her premiums will in fact increase, but so will her deductible and out of pocket costs.

The options posted today are far less affordable than what she had before. For a plan covering much of what her previous plan covered with a $3500 annual deductible, she will now pay $180 a month. Just a few short months ago she paid $350 every three months for a plan with more coverage and a $1500 annual deductible. The cost increase is a staggering 95.1 percent. If she actually gets sick or has to go to the hospital, she could be paying $5,660 a year, that's $2,760 more than the year before.

"I can't afford that," she responded when I did the math with her during our phone interview.

"That's almost 15 percent of my take home pay. I'm going to be paying almost double for a plan I doubt I'll even use. They told us this law was going to help insurace be affordable. They lied. I'm being responsible and paying for my own care and I don't know how long I'll be able to afford to do that now."

She's a 32 year old healthy female with no pre-existing conditions, and has been paying for her own health insurance since she graduated college. As a research assistant who works on contract, she does not have an employer sponsored plan. She shopped for the plan that best fit her needs, and her budget, and she had one, but now it's gone.

ObamaCare is hurting the very people it was supposed to help. ObamaCare relies on the young and healthy to buy plans they may not even need and can't afford, in order to subsidize the costs of health care for older, sicker Americans. Even if she signs up for a state exchange, there's no guarantee the subsidy (around $30 per month) will come anywhere close to covering the increased costs.

When asked during the interview if she'd continue paying for her own care she responded,

"Look, I want to continue to be responsible and pay my own way, but I'm only going to be fined $95 if I don't have health care right? I can also opt in after I'm sick because they can't deny someone with pre-exisiting conditions. Who would pay these rates for insurance they may never need?"

Exactly. ObamaCare is filled with perverse incentives, and yes, incentives matter. Instead of crafting health care legislation which increased competition, reduced costs and offered high risk pools for those with pre-existing conditions, Democrats in Congress passed a law that raises rates and encourages people to make less money in order to get free goodies from the government.

Bravo Mr. President, bravo.

Follow Kristina Ribali on twitter for updates and more health care news.

"ObamaCare is hurting the very people it was supposed to help." is a lie.
ObamaCare was designed to provide a windfall to the insurance companies, mostly just to get them on board promoting the disaster, and to provide another perk for illegal aliens, and to keep the welfare voters fat and happy.
Nothing in the Affordable Care Act is affordable for the vast majority of working Americans nor do they care.
Obama is a small power-hungry man that found a way in one fell swoop to control all of the people and 1/3'rd of our economy.
If any thought had been put towards such a massive undertaking it would take at least a year to come up with a workable and affordable law. With this not being the goal they threw everything anybody said, in the middle of the night thinking most Americans were asleep and wouldn't know what happened while they were dreaming, into a database program and then hit print.
They, the law makers, didn't know what was in it because every single idea any one of them said was in it somewhere, and they had to pass it so it would be printed in a readable format so they could see what was in it.

The ObamaCare bailout provision is leading some health insurance companies to low-ball premiums to attract consumers during the open enrollment period, but they could be setting up enrollees for sharp cost spikes once the transitional section of the law expires after 2016.

As one of our millions of FreedomWorks members nationwide, I urge you to contact your representative and senators today and urge them to support the “ObamaCare Taxpayer Bailout Prevention Act.” Sponsored in the Senate by Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), and in the House by Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.), this bill would simply eliminate the section of ObamaCare that provides for taxpayer bailouts of health insurance companies.

Being tasked with a response to the State of the Union address isn't easy. The message, usually given by a fresh face, is carefully crafted to fluff up a party's priorities for the coming months, as well as offer Americans a distinction between their agenda and what the president offered them earlier in the evening.

President Barack Obama delivered his sixth State of the Union address to Congress last night, laying out a litany of mostly terrible policy proposals, as well as attempting to defend his economic record. There's no denying that he's a strong orator who tells a story very well, but the substance of the speech itself was more of the same stale ideas and poor leadership that Americans have seen throughout the course of his presidency. Though there are plenty of policy items worthy of analysis, here are some lines that stuck out.

In the nearly five years since ObamaCare passed Congress and became law, Republican leaders have yet to rally around a specific set of healthcare alternatives. Railing against the 2010 law has been convenient for campaign trail rhetoric, but stalling, as the Supreme Court prepares to hear oral arguments in King v. Burwell, is no longer acceptable.

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is seeking contractors for its latest ObamaCare-related endeavor, a massive data warehouse for storing consumer information. The Weekly Standard reports that the agency is building a database designed for "capturing, aggregating, and analyzing information" related to ObamaCare enrollees and Medicare recipients.

Americans already face a $1.8 trillion regulatory burden. These heavy costs are passed on by businesses to consumers, who spend almost a quarter of their annual income complying with regulations often approved executive-level agencies, which have effectively become the fourth branch of the federal government.

Hypocrisy has never been a stranger in the ivory towers of academia, but the latest development among the faculty at Harvard is a particularly delicious bit of irony. It seems that professors, like everyone, don’t much appreciate having to pay higher prices for health insurance. As a result of the Affordable Care Act’s mandates, however, prices are set to rise significantly within the halls of academia.

Before the initial ObamaCare open enrollment period, the Obama administration emphasized the need for millennials -- young people between the ages of 18 and 34 -- to sign up for health plans available on the exchanges. Health insurance companies need diversity in their risk pools to offset costs, because older and sicker people tend to utilize their coverage more often than the young and healthy.